Publications

The Experience of Occupation 1931-1949

This volume, which contains the proceedings of a conference sponsored by the International Committee and convened at Wuhan University in 2008, was edited by Professor Hu Dekun, Professor of the Institute for International Studies, Wuhan University and published by Wuhan University Press. The text is in English and Chinese.

Prisoners of War, Prisoner of Peace: Captivity, Homecoming and Memory in World War II

Edited by Bob Moore & Barbara Hately-Broad

This book is the outcome of a conference organized by the International Committee for the History of the Second World War in Hamburg in July 2002.

With the Hamburg conference on the homecoming of prisoners of war after World War II, the Committee pursued three goals. THe first was to counter the prevalent tendency to treat the European and Pacific theatres of war as completely separate from each other by involving historians from Australia, Japan and the United States, together with historians from most European countries, in an intensive exchange on defined areas of research relevant to all belligerent societies. The second goal was to encourage new approaches to the topic, crossing the barriers between social and military history, between political, cultural and gender history and widening the chronological horizon by investigating and longer-term consequences of war-related experiences, such as captivity. The third goal was to encourage the participation of younger researchers, as they stand to benefit most from international exchange, and to initiate a new phase of historical research based on the principles of a transnational approach. With nineteen contributors from eleven countries, the conference covered a great diversity of geographical areas, but the outcome showed a high degree of convergence between the participants on questions of methodology and interpretation.

The Second World War in 20th Century History

The reader will find in this special issue of the Bulletin of the International Committee for the History of the Second World War a series of contributions for the August 2000 congress of the ICHSWW, in Oslo, in the framework of the 19th International Congress of Historical Sciences.

Since this formula met with such success at the preceding congress in 1995 at Montreal, the executive board made the decision to repeat the experiment of the first “ Blue Book ”, and to offer a collection destined to nourish an open discussion on the theme reserved for the end of the millennium : the history of the Second World War in the perspective of the general history of the 20th century.

The collection comprises two parts. The first consists specifically of the war itself, with contributions on military, diplomatic, and political aspects, as well as on the short-term consequences of the conflict. It covers equally the events that marked the end of the war and the immediate postwar period.

The second part focuses on the long-term effects of the war, either in the framework of international relations, or in that of the record of a history of memory, representations, and the uses of the past. The volume ends with two bibliographical essays. It is important to recall that these texts had been sent to us by our national correspondents who, located all over the world, number about thirty. If the Committee has accepted to publish them, we remind you that these texts are the sole responsibility of the authors and reflect their scientific and methodological options whatever their eventual political or ideologicalconsiderations.

As it is, this collection appears to constitute a reflection, certainly incomplete, of the current historiography of the Second World War in all of its diversity, but it aims to nourish a discussion that is not ready to close the subject.